What Ferguson Has Revealed

“Whatever happened to Michael Brown in the moments before he died has become secondary to what the response to his death has revealed,” Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker. Since a police officer shot and killed the unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, the shooting—and the vigils, looting, volunteer cleanup, peaceful protests, and overwhelmingly disproportionate police response—has become a national microcosm of urban racial injustice and what is being called the “militarization” of police forces.

If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.

That war is enabled by military-grade weaponry available to police since the 1990s under the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency and the “section 1033” program over which it presides. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, John Payne explained earlier this year, journalist Radley Balko makes the case that the Founders would have seen that kind of militarized police as an unconstitutional standing army. Balko wrote, “Just before the American Revolution, it wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia; it was the England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement.”

This would be one thing if Ferguson were in a war zone, or if protesters were violent—although, it’s hard to imagine a situation in which American police would need a mine-resistant vehicle. But an episode of looting aside, Ferguson police aren’t dealing with any particular danger. Nonetheless, they’re treating demonstrators—and Ferguson residents writ large—as a population to occupy, not citizens to protect.

Adam Weinstein put it more bluntly at Gawker. “The U.S. armed forces exercise more discipline and compassion than these cops.” He cites the first page of the Army’s field manual on civil disturbances, which emphasizes proportional, nuanced responses. “Inciting a crowd to violence or a greater intensity of violence by using severe enforcement tactics must be avoided.” The manual also notes that “highly emotional social and economic issues” inform such disturbances, and that “it takes a small (seemingly minor) incident” to set off violence “if community relations with authorities are strained.”

Unlike the military, who are trained in nonviolent options for conflict resolution, the police often lack such knowledge. Bonnie Kristian expounded this failure and reasons behind systematic police brutality earlier this summer, noting also that cops are rarely held accountable for abuse. “Only one out of every three accused cops are convicted nationwide, while the conviction rate for civilians is literally double that.”

The entrenched racial injustice behind Michael Brown’s death will be difficult to root out, as it has been over centuries of American history. But the decades of policy that allowed for police abuse of Brown, and his town’s peaceful protesters, could be reversed—and if the public outcry over Ferguson is anything to judge by, Americans will be keeping a closer eye on the police in the coming years.

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14 Responses to What Ferguson Has Revealed

I see where the Governor of MO is brining in state troopers to patrol Ferguson. Apparently there is a lot of bad blood between the police and the Black residents of Ferguson. Militarized policing is making enemies of the residents. Whatever happened to community policing?

Yes. The very odd thing is the most paramilitary police force in any state (up until recently, apparently) is going to be the state police known in some states as “state troopers.” The idea that bringing in the state police to reduce the military feel of the situation just goes to show how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone.

Just a thought: May be the original intent of giving police more military grade weapons is because the criminals (not civil protesters) have military grade weapons? Which definitely is the case given our very loose gun control.

Last week, the outrage was all about ISIS, or Gaza, or the Ukraine. This week, it is all about Missouri.

Last week, we were shocked, shocked that horrors could happen in far-away places with strange sounding names. This week, we are shocked, shocked that 50 years of preaching “Law and Order” have come home to roost.

Last week, we all were relieved the bad stuff was happening somewhere else. This week, we realized we are not immune to bad stuff just because — America.

Life, freedom, home and hearth, are all fragile possessions, delicate and easily shattered quantities… and we are rudely brought back into the world the other six billion humans inhabit.

It is often remarked, actually a false cliché, there are no atheists in foxholes. The state of the world being what it is, right now, America is a foxhole, relatively safe. And the call is coming soon to get up and go “Over the Top”, into the barbed wire and machine guns, where it is not safe at all.

The only issue that is sad here is the argument concerning militarization of the police.

It is a so what. It is a doesn’t matter. It is the kind of sideways curve that makes any discussion of the deep seeded tensions in the community moot all for some silly discussion about an orientation that blacks in most US cities are well aware of.

To wit whites have for more than forty years defended in dealing with black people.

This is the standard mission bleed. It’s the same silliness that occurs when some matter of color reaches the national stage.

It’s not about an over reactive neighborhood watch member, it’s about the right to own guns.

It’s not about police brutality in 1960′s — 1970′s inner city pressure cookers. It’s about the law and all people.

The African Americans should not permit the issue to be hijacked by misleading self serving rhetoric.

It matters not whether the police are in tanks or on bicycles. what matters is the relational dynamics between the police in that community among those citizens. The only legitimate dynamic that would lend to any links, is that the dynamic has existed in the US criminal justice system prior to the first swat team coming on board any department.

What has Ferguson revealed? The answer is supposed to be, “Too much police militarization”. But the ongoing events reveal the actual lesson, namely the out of control criminal behavior of segments of the urban population. Days and days of rioting kind of spoils the narrative about the supposedly over-armed police. As I write, a newsflash just came out out that there is now a curfew imposed. For those looking to shift the blame away from our impulse-control-challenged brethren, better luck next incident.

Yea, as the revelations kept coming, what seemed to be something new and startling turned out to be the same old, same old.

For the record, I think that cops are way too trigger happy. Rodney King wouldn’t have been beaten into submission today, he would have died in a hail of bullets as soon as he exited his vehicle, and with him the two guys in it that did comply with police.

“The only legitimate dynamic that would lend to any links, is that the dynamic has existed in the US criminal justice system prior to the first swat team coming on board any department.”
Absolutely true, the issue is not militarization but that the police and the ghettoized blacks have had terribly stressful and violent and, yes, often racist, relations in the past and continue to have such relations today. This is entirely predictable and every so often it has escalated into open revolt and pseudo-warfare, as it has in Ferguson, Missourah; and since that situation was more or less initiated by the police––they have in this case egregiously used indiscriminate force, both in the shooting of Michael Brown and in the repression of protests and their inevitable escalation into full-scale riot and violent resistance, which is disproportionate and defensive and thus the issue is only “the out of control criminal behavior of segments of the urban population” IF that segment of the population is the police force.